The Mystery of the Druids Review

Introduction

The Mystery of the Druids (Druid for
short) may have started life as a good game, but the developers lost
sight of it somewhere in its production process. Druid
isn't an awful game, but the last evening of play elicited a sigh of
relief from both myself and my wife.

Graphics (quality, animations, cut scenes)

Druid consists of 3D characters in front of
pre-rendered backgrounds. The backgrounds were detailed, nicely lit,
and very beautiful, and the cut scenes were detailed and extremely
well done. On the other hand, the 3D characters were blocky, and
moved in an extremely unnatural manner. Also, regardless of the
setting I used for rendering (software, hardware, slow, fast), some of
the joins between polygons would be visible as bright orange lines on
the characters. My GeForce 2 MX graphics card had the latest drivers,
but I still couldn't find any setting that eliminated the problem
entirely. The end result was that the character's rendering and
movements detracted from the game, which is never a good thing.

Sound (music, voices, special effects)

The voices acting wasn't anything special, but it was usually good
enough to be acceptable. There were a few exceptions, such as the
voice for Lord Sinclair's butler; the voice actor was obviously
attempting an upper-class Brtitish accent, and failed miserably.

Story (plot, theme, depth)

I won't give away too many of the plot details here, but I did find
the entire concept to be difficult to swallow. The game starts out as
a standard mystery, in which you play Brent Halligan of the Scotland
Yard. The problem is that the game immediately starts getting
silly, with a boss that refuses to allow you to use your telephone,
coworkers that won't lend you a pair of scissors, and so on. The
story just gets weirder from there on; the script writers for this
game really had some problems coming up with a coherent storyline that
was believable, even in a fantasy setting.

There is a rather gruesome cut scene in this game, showing a man
being butchered alive (and later eaten). You probably don't want your
children watching or playing this game.

Characters (depth, development, interaction)

Considering the sheer amount of dialogue, I expected rather more
than I got. The characters themselves were pretty well drawn through
the dialogue, but a lot of the personal details were obviously just
pasted on, and not an intrinsic part of the plot. If this game was a
novel, then it would rate no better than "potboiler."

Puzzles (difficulty, uniqueness, suitability, ugliness, linearity)

I had serious problems with many of the puzzles, and I think this
was due to a lack of game feedback. I found myself solving a puzzle
that I din't even know about at a certain point in the game. In other
words, I was collecting bits and pieces of inventory for no known
reason, and I only found out about the need for them at (or after) the
actual point of usage. It made the game feel extremely frustrating to
play, since I was doing things before the game provided any
motivation to do them.

Conversation trees get tedious, since you must revisit entire
conversations just in case something new has shown up deep in the
bowels of the conversation tree. There were several times where I
needed the walkthrough to tell me exactly which conversation branch I
had failed to revisit in order to trigger some action in the game.

The game's use of hot spots was extremely inconsistent. There were
hot spots all over, and only some of them are good for things other
than right clicking and getting a description. The problem is, you
never really know which is which, except by pulling out an inventory
item and seeing if you got a red X or not when it was passed over the
hot spot. Even worse, there were a few hot spots that didn't show up
at all via the cursor. You just had to know that an inventory item
could be applied to a certain area.

In addition, you end up with a large number of inventory items that
you are forced to carry around for the entire game. This wouldn't be
problematic, except that periodically I was reduced to trying every
inventory item on a hot spot, which could take a long time.

Druids also has a puzzle-based bug that play testing
should have eliminated -- a dead end. I had to replay a good chunk of
the game because I inadvertently combined two inventory items (apple
juice and a flask) before I should have. If you do that, you will be
stuck forever waiting for a conversation item that never appears.

There were several timed puzzles, but the timing was reasonably
generous. I don't know why the designers bothered, since many other
puzzles had no timing constraints at all, and they worked just as
well.

Controls (user interface, save/restore, sound/video adjustments)

Druid uses a basic point and click interface, with the
right mouse button used to elicit descriptions of items and the left
mouse button used to pick up or manipulate objects.

The save game system was acceptable, and the game also had a
built-in gamma adjustment, a feature I always appreciate.

Bugs or problems

The game was extremely bug-ridden.

The very first problem I ran into was the dreaded Safedisk copy
protection -- the very first time I ran the game, I got the Safedisk
logo, and then it promptly hung. It hung like this about every third
time I tried to run the game. I hunted around and found an executable
called "unsafedisk" that completely removes SafeDisk (and allowed me
to start the game). Macrovision, which invented SafeDisk, has a lot
to answer for, as do any game manufacturers that use it in some
misguided attempt to prevent copying. For those of you that run into
problems with SafeDisk, go to www.gamecopyworld.com and
search for a "cracked" version of your game executable.

The second problem I ran into involved some extremely long access
times to load some scenes, and sometimes the scene never would load.
The game didn't come with a full install, but a visit to the support
web page had some instruction on how to copy both CDs to your hard
drive. After doing this, as well as removing SafeDisk, I finally had
a game that would start reliably, and it never needed to access the CD
drive.

The game would hang completely three or four times in an evening's
play, alway during a conversation sequence. The only way out was to
completely reboot, forcing us to replay everything since our last
save. We very quickly got into the habit of saving very, very
frequently.

I already mentioned the dead end, which I consider to be an
outright bug.

Install/Uninstall

There was no full install option on CD, but the support site
tells you how to do it.

Cons

Conclusion

I didn't hate this game, but it just wasn't any fun to play, and
that is what a game is supposed to be all about. For those that have
read my review of Beyond Atlantis
II, you will notice that I ranted quite a bit -- the reason
being that there was a really good game hidden under all of its
problems. Mystery of the Druids doesn't have enough
"goodness" in it for me to get nearly as excited. Not recommended,
with or without a walkthrough.